


Inside and Outside

by entanglednow



Category: Firefly
Genre: Angst, Disturbing Themes, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-25
Updated: 2009-08-25
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wasn't a man prone to wilful denial but he was pretty sure nothing good could come from having something buried inside your head. Or worse, something missing out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inside and Outside

Mal knew well enough that the brain was a funny thing. Messed up and complicated, and liable to turn inside out on you just when you'd gone your whole life counting on it.

He knew that there were bad things in your life you could shake off. Put behind you the moment they were finished with. You could just shut them away and never once think about them again.

But some things you couldn't get rid of. They didn't have to be worse, they didn't have to be more horrible or even to fuck you up in more terrible ways than any of the others. They just had to be the wrong thing at the wrong time, to just hit you where you didn't even realise you had a weakness, to crack something you never thought could be broken and dig their way inside. Sit somewhere where you couldn't ever dig them out.

And sometimes they just stayed with you for no reason, wrong in a way you couldn't quite put your finger on, but they got deep in your head all the same and stayed there.

He'd been dragged out of a bar two weeks ago, spent four days he could barely remember somewhere else, a place that he couldn't shake off. For all that he'd been trying, with working, and drinking and, when that wasn't good enough, with trying to paper over it with things that had treated him a lot worse.

Mal had been running as far and as fast as he could for a week, and if the crew had noticed they hadn't said a damn thing about it. But it was no good running when you were dragging your brain and your memories right along with you.

Not that he remembered much, and maybe that was the worst of it. That it wasn't so much the memory as the suggestion of a memory, of a lot of memories that he couldn't quite catch. Of a great big gnawing hole where memories should be.

Mal remembered a room.

It hadn't been the sort of room you went to if you wanted to be fixed up. Not the sort of room where doctors made you better.

No, it had been the sort of room where doctors made you wrong.

Mal had told himself that he'd stumbled out into the light before anyone had gotten a chance to go digging where they weren't wanted.

Before anyone had done anything to him.

He'd stumbled into the light and gotten the hell out of that place. Back to his ship, back where things were washed out and dirty and familiar.

Where nothing shone like metal teeth.

But no matter how much space he stretched out between then and now there was still an ache inside his head that hadn't been there before, shoved in deep, deep enough that even all crazy thoughts of jamming a knife in there and carving it out seemed pointless.

Simon had said there was nothing wrong. He'd checked him over as deep as their tech would go. As thoroughly as he could, with Mal's half remembered descriptions of a dozen machines he wouldn't want near him at the best of times. Mal hadn't exactly been itching to ask the good doc if he had something inside his brain. Something that shouldn't be there.

Something he'd be better off not knowing about.

He wasn't a man prone to wilful denial but he was pretty sure nothing good could come from having something buried inside your head. Or worse, something missing out of it.

Either way, there wasn't a lot he could do about it without admitting to his worries, to his only half-certain paranoia and wouldn't that sound a fine and crazy thing. Or trying to get a bunch of medical tests for no reason he could fathom, with no proof he could put into words.

And that had turned out so well for River.

Talking of River, Mal wasn't entirely alone in the dark.

For such a little girl she took up a lot of space once you noticed she was there.

He swivelled the chair round just far enough to see her.

River was curled into the other one, which looked three sizes too big for her, hands half buried in her hair, watching him from out of the darkness.

"Your brother know you're here?" Mal asked her, over the quiet hum of night.

The expression she made over her own fingers Mal knew well enough to read.

"If he's awake he's going to be fretting."

River pulled a face.

"Knows well enough that I won't fall out of the ship," she told him.

"Doesn't mean he won't worry, you and I both know that. Doesn't no one fret quite like Simon when he wakes up and finds you gone."

"I woke up with tentacles, sliding, prodding, curling into everything. Until I was touching the whole world," River declared, her tone was lilting and cautionary, suggesting it wasn't a happy experience.

Mal wasn't entirely sure what to say to that.

"Granted that's a bracing way to wake up too."

"It's stopped now," she said simply.

"Well that's gratifying I expect."

"You can see in the dark now," she told him quietly, with more than one shade of certainty. She sounded for all the world like she was sorry about it. Like it hurt her in some terrible way she couldn't explain.

"What?"

She stared at him, expression strange and fragile and unreadable.

"You see in the dark."

"I can't see in the dark," Mal told her, more than used to soothing her peculiar fears by now. "That's crazy talk. Because it's dark in here and I can't see what's over there." He pointed across the room maybe as some sort of defence. But River didn't follow his finger.

"I don't mean on the outside," she said softly, uncharacteristically direct. She was still watching, toes scrunching and relaxing on the edge of the chair, almost as if she was running while standing still.

Like she wanted to leave, but she was resisting, curious and brave.

Mal turned in the chair until he could look at her straight on. She didn't tilt her head away but left them eye to eye.

The moment was far too full for something so full of nothing. River's pointed observation felt suddenly sharper and more relevant than before.

"Do you know what they did to me?" he asked quietly, and he didn't like the way his voice sounded one little bit..

She nodded.

He held his breath, watched for any sign that she was somewhere far away.

But there was nothing.

Just her attention.

"What?"

"Different colour, same flavours," she said smoothly.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Mal thought he had half a handle on exactly which way her crazy brain twisted. But sometimes she was so far off the map it was a wonder she was visible.

"That's not very helpful," he told her, frustration banked back hard enough that she didn't react to the words. But there was a shake in his voice, holding a twitching desperate need to push harder, to demand. She stared at him, fingers lifting every so often towards where he was fairly, horribly, sure now that he'd had something shoved into his brain. But she never touched, she held herself back, fingers pressed instead to her own head and then fluttering away.

Until she moved, shifted out of her own chair and over to his own in one slithering movement.

"What do you see?" she asked, then held her breath as if she was just a little afraid of the answer.

Mal frowned and shook his head.

"Nothing, I don't see a damn-"

She moved again, shifted over him, a slip-slide, slip-slide of bare thighs on his waist. Which was possibly entirely innocent but felt anything but. Mal most definitely should protest that, but River was still leaning, leaning, curve of bare shoulders and lost dress straps and miles of hair.

"Hey!"

"Stop looking," she told him and her hand folded over his eyes, small cold fingers, oddly gentle. Like she believed she could crush his skull if she pushed too hard.

Mal's hand reached up, caught her wrist.

"Wait," she commanded, voice cold and sharp and strangely fierce, and he surprised himself by simply holding her skin.

The inside of his own eyelids was darker than the depths of space.

"Tell me what you see."

"I told you before there's nothing but-"

...

 _Red on white_

 _Broken hiss of static and wet fingers on glass._

 _..._

Mal moved his head under her hand. He could hear the hush-hush of River's breath. Could feel trails of her hair tickling his mouth.

...

 _there's blood on his hands, even though he can't see them, a wet glint of metal that's closer and then further away. Blurred out suddenly by a trail of hair._

 _'How much do you see?'_

 _The whole world is briefly blue, and a quick brutal snap of rubber, or plastic, fills his whole vision._

 _Someone is screaming-_

Mal pulled River's hand away from his eyes, found the dimly lit interior of his own ship, the quiet flickering light of the instruments, and complete silence.

River's face was a pale shadow beneath all her hair, expression unhappy.

She stared down at him, at the way his pulse was suddenly far too fast. The way he couldn't catch a damn breath and his chest felt like he'd run a mile.

He felt like someone had filled him up to the brim with sudden cold fear.

But the very worst thing was that it wasn't his own.

"You're different inside now," River told him. "Different like me."

  



End file.
